My First 2.5 Weeks of Silicon Valley
I came here without expectations, but every day has been exceeding expectations…
Checklist of things done.
- Met a new friend at the Caltrain Station, and was invited to his friend’s pregame party before celebrating pride at Dolores Park.
- Couchsurfed at Summer Playbook’s HQ for five nights, and befriended the coolest Harvard boys of all time ;)
- Found a permanent housing through Craigslist upon the 3rd day of arrival with 2 amazing flatmates and 2 cute flat-cats.
- Couchsurfed at my own apartment for a week before officially moving in last Thursday (yay)
- Visited Ocean Beach x2 and saw amazing sunsets, x2
- Visited San Francisco x3, and the last time was just to have lunch…
- Couchsurfed at a friend’s place in SF
- Met up with old friends — Charlene, Zac, Shahd, Addie
- Learned that if you say ‘San Fran’, you’re not from ‘San Francisco’, must say ‘SF’ or ‘the city’
- Visited Google (thanks to Bianca!), Facebook (thanks to Alejandro!), 23AndMe (thanks to Suraj!), Docker
- Learned some Angular JS
- Went to 3 amazing parties on the 4th of July
- Tried a keg stand, twice — at the old Facebook House where Zuck started Facebook — which was where intern.community hosted their 4th of July Pool & Grill Party (with more than 600 people attending!! 🎉🎊)
- Went to Big Sur — ended up liking Carmel Beach much better — and spent time with a great group of people
- Went to Pescadero — attempted to watch the sunset but it was too cloudy that night
- Cooked a lot of Taiwanese noodles, dumplings and scrambled eggs
- Got connected to NavTalent
- South Bay is way quieter than SF but living near downtown Mountain View is not too bad :)
What is Summer Playbook?
Summer Playbook is a startup that allows you to find other college students around the globe location based. It connects students from 373 universities around the world, and creates a community where you can meet other college students around, and have an amazing summer. It was founded by Luke, Raph and Sean, and they went through YC’18’s batch in January. Probably the kindest and most genuine people I’ve met in Bay Area. Every university student should try out Summer Playbook at summerplaybook.com.
What is Caltrain?
Caltrain is the main transportation method that brings you from San Francisco to San Jose (which combined together is called Silicon Valley, SF Bay Area) It takes around 1 hr and 45 mins to get from SF to SJ via Caltrain. Mountain View is between those two stations and much closers to SJ than SF. It’s kind of ridiculous how there is only 1 train per hour, coming from Hong Kong/ Taiwan, where trains come pretty much at most every 10 minutes.
What is intern.community?
It’s a Slack Channel exclusively for summer interns in the Bay Area, Seattle and New York. Just in the Bay Area channel there are 2500 + interns! Can you believe it! Shout out to Anant who made this happen! There are more than 30 channels, there are always events, office-tours, and my first bonfire was with them, as well as my 4th of July celebrations!
A little more background on how and why I am in the Bay Area — I joined Zingbox as an UI Engineer to work on the front-end of an IoT security platform for hospitals. I have been in the Bay Area since 6/21 and will be here for several more months. I applied to this position through a special program called CUSPEI, which links Chinese universities with startups in Silicon Valley — and I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate. Coming to Silicon Valley was a tough journey. When I was studying abroad at University of Washington, I applied to 20+ software engineering positions and only heard back from 2: Twitter and Airbnb. Even with an internal referral at Amazon, I still didn’t make the cut. After applying for the CUSPEI program, I waited 1.5 months until hearing back from them, and was scheduled an interview for ~ 2 hours. Soon enough I was given the role as a UI engineer, and I have been waiting for the moment to be in Silicon Valley every since.
But first impressions of Silicon Valley?
Why is it so spread out? The lack of accessible public transportations like many other places in the USA makes going from places to places expensive (Uber) or almost impossible (1.5 hr + via buses/ trains). If you live in the South Bay (Palo Alto/ Mountain View) and you would like to go for an event happening in downtown San Francisco, it’s actually 3+ cities away in real life and that it is either time-consuming or costly to go just for an evening. I even joked with my friend yesterday, Bay Area should be called Big Area instead…
Is everyone talking about starting a company?
Definitely not everyone — but there is a good amount. Many people I’ve met has had a startup before or is working on something right now. Some dropped out to work on their own startup. Some do enjoy working in big companies because of its perks, comparably risk-free life and high concentration of smart people.
What do I do at work?
I work on front-end! Basically anything you can see on a software application. I also watch World Cup with colleagues, go out for meals, have snacks, chat about life.
What are my hacks of the Bay Area up till now?
- Craigslist is useful — I found my housing up here! It may be frustrating at times given it’s not the best UI… also it takes forever for people to respond, and usually for housing posts, they would require immediate move in.
- Join as many groups/ communities as you can, eg. 2018 Bay Area Summer Interns, intern.community slack channel, Summer Playbook…
- Use Eventbrite! There are so many free events where you get to hear first hand experiences and have some free pizza & beers.
- Don’t say no too often — opportunities usually don’t knock on a closed door.
- Reach out to friends in the area! Reach out to strangers!
And, that’s a wrap for now! More articles to come…
Adios,
Tania
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